Feb 01, 2011

The Writer's Life: Have you heard of a “commonplace book”? These daily tweets, “The Writer’s Life,” are my Commonplace Book."

First, a mea culpa: how often have I said that no matter how well you know something,e.g., a quotation, check it when you’ve typed it? A reader, Ken Fletcher, has pointed out to me that I mixed up the Bronte sisters and their authorships. It’s now corrected and thank you, Ken.

Commonplace Books: They were first a tool of self-education, used by people who had newly learned to write. They kept – often elaborately decorated -notebooks for noting down interesting, arresting and useful phrases, comments, jokes, quotations, proverbs that caught their attention in a commonplace day. Then it developed into something unnecessary but quite stylish, a means for ladies and gentlemen of education to capture words and illuminations that flew in the air abovetheir heads. Writers have always used them, if not necessarily calling them commonplace books; an idea comes to you – write it down. And it’s handy (I’d say essential) to have a notebook where all such write-it-downs appear.

I’ve known more than one person who kept a commonplace book. One or two have even been published; and it stands to reason that from a commonplace book you learn a great deal about the person who keeps it. And, though The Writer’s Lifeis not the first commonplace book on the Internet, it’s cool to think that a private, if not intimate, literary practice that has been in play for a number of centuries is now active in the most modern mass communication tool that we possess.